Take the complete 2010s output of Bustle, Slate, and Jezebel, suspend it in formaldehyde, fish it out years later, and you might get something close to Adult Braces, a memoir by American essayist-comedian Lindy West that somehow came out this week. West is best known for Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, a 2016 essay collection about her experiences with body positivity and liberal feminism. A TV adaptation ran from 2019 to 2021, once both those social movements were safely over.
Adult Braces follows West as she comes to terms with a polyamorous relationship she never saw coming. She’s recording the audiobook version of an essay collection called The Witches Are Coming (what else?) when she finds out her husband, Aham, has started going out with Roya, an “artistic director at an arts organisation in Portland, Oregon.” (Where else?). West only agreed to polyamory in the abstract. Now she’s stuck with a real-life third. Roya keeps sending West irksome texts, which feature irksome phrases like “Thank you for your openness toward me being here at a critical time.”
Roya reopens the author’s insecurities about her body image and self-worth. “That night,” reads one passage, “I had a nightmare that Aham told me he loved Roya more than he loved me.” Eventually she cools down. “…All of our interactions have been really healing for me,” she texts Roya. She concurs that they are “affirming.” Aham sends his new girlfriend one of West’s nudes; the two women realise they fancy each other. The three of them recouple, or rethrouple. West becomes an enthusiastic participant in what she calls a “three-person marriage.” “My skin [once] blistered when I imagined Aham having sex with someone else,” she writes. “It felt like I was dying at just the thought of it. Now I hear Aham having sex with someone else at least once a week, and my reaction is, “Could you jabronis keep it down?”
Adult Braces is a road memoir, and West is a bit like Kerouac: she epitomises the stock literary style of her generation while irritating and alienating everyone else. She isn’t afraid to break into all-caps or use self-quirkifying exclamation marks. “It’s 2026!” she says at one point. “Fire all men from all jobs!” She dedicates the book to herself. Her antiquarian style puts her at a comfortable distance from modern observers. To the press and its public, Lindy West is less a person than a theoretical construct.
By now we must all be used to weighing in on theoretical spats between theoretical people. Shortly after the publication of Shrill came the Reddit story, a narrative form which now threatens to unseat the contemporary novel. The Reddit forum “Am I The Asshole?” regularly garners thousands of comments; YouTubers can get millions of views just by reading popular posts out for listeners at home. Someone is always done wrong; someone else is termed The Asshole. (This is a distinctly millennial word). The internet becomes one enormous agony aunt. Readers get to experience self-satisfaction as they chide others for falling short of their own moral standards, and to feel charitable as they advise others to leave abusive relationships or cut off their relatives.
Last week, after an interview with the New York Times’ Modern Love podcast, West floated into the path of what might be termed the Unwanted Polyamory Advice Industrial Complex.
“The other woman is younger and much hotter… they are 100% kicking Lindy out of the relationship,” said one X commenter. “Lindy West’s problem isn’t that she’s fat…” said another. “Lindy West’s problem is that her husband has taken full advantage of her obviously low self-esteem.”
“Sorry, but her self-worth has been seriously compromised,” said a comment on a People article about West’s throupling. “He ain’t all that so dump him ASAP. She can do better!”
“I’m sorry she twisted herself to make him happy,” said someone else. “That’s a lot of years and a lot of therapy so you can act like you are OK with it,” said yet another person.
The commenters have also spent the past week dissecting a YouTube interview posted three years ago by the “self-acceptance” channel StyleLikeU. They have thoughts about the throuple’s asymmetric body language. “He hasn’t removed his hand from Roya, once!!!!!!!!!” said one.
It turns out “self-acceptance” is often inextricable from sexploitation. The triple interview is one of hundreds in a web series called The What’s Underneath Project. Each instalment features “diverse role models” who answer sensitive, intimate questions while slowly stripping down to their underwear. The format is meant to offer a visual metaphor: baring the soul is a bit like baring the body. Its real purpose is obvious. Viewers are more likely to click if they think they’ll see someone naked; watching until the end will mean even more money from YouTube ads. The channel’s most viewed videos are of supermodels disrobing; the logic of featuring a throuple is that you’ll be able to imagine them having sex by the end.
West’s case is only the tip of the iceberg. The new visibility of polyamory means an exploding sleaze industry. There appears to be serious money in airing the private business of people who are already mocked and marginalised. Polycules pop up regularly on the YouTube channel Love Don’t Judge, which used to be part of gross-out franchise Barcroft TV and now sits under the Future PLC umbrella. “Love Don’t Judge is an inspiring and uplifting series about real couples who are thriving, despite pressure from the outside world,” says the channel description. The polycules featured here are usually extracted from rural, working-class “America B,” with frequent incursions from what might be termed “Britain B.”
Lindy West at least has media cachet; if the speculation gets too much, she can always write a different, contradictory book. The others cannot fight back.
The general contours of this pro-acceptance clickbait feel suspiciously similar to the general contours of pornography. The videos are called things like “My GF Loves Seeing Me Sleep With Other Men,” “I Control My Three Partners 24/7,” and “I Was A Virgin Until I Met My Two Girlfriends.” These are the sort of relationship dynamics people will leave YouTube to get off to. Producers know they’ll get more algorithmic traction if viewers speculate, no matter the nature of the speculation – so the videos appear with discussion questions like “Would you let your BF sleep with other men?”
The media became obsessed with polyamory at a time when everyone was awfully concerned about positive representation. At one point it might have seemed empathetic and open-minded. But it’s now clear that the resultant circus just exists to exploit people whose only crime is being slightly embarrassing. It’s already leading us back to a pre-Bustle, pre-Jezebel, pre-Lindy West status quo. Part of the draw to the West saga is that very few people believe she is happy; online commentators take stories like hers as living proof of the merits of monogamy. The Dissatisfied Polyamorous Partner has taken on a stock role in our public discourse: like Pierrot in the Commedia Dell’Arte, she’s a source of communal pathos and entertainment, and she’s meant to teach us all a lesson. Here is another. Are you in a throuple? Never, under any circumstances, should you alert the media.
[Further reading: Big Tech is buttering you up]
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